ThrdCoast: So you’re all bunking there and working?
Jesse: Yeah, it was like exile. We were exiling ourselves to make this music.
ThrdCoast: How long were you there?
Dillon: We went for the first time in January of 2016 for like three weeks. It was our first time just being in a room together and outputting.
Jesse: And we’re not fidelity snobs, so all of these records were made kind of… poorly.
ThrdCoast: Well, there’s so much sound in your music that it seems like nothing is really off limits.
Jesse: Totally. We just had an eight-channel interface—
Dillon: Just put three mics on the drums and you’re good to go.
Jesse: And for better or for worse, we’ve learned that a sound can be fixed instead of captured.
ThrdCoast: Manipulated.
Jesse: Yeah, exactly, which informed us a lot.
ThrdCoast: Did that turn into a sort of philosophy for that project?
Jesse: Absolutely. It still is.
Dillon: I’m definitely more informed by that in ways that I couldn’t even have imagined. Even recording drums for other people, I’m like, “You can get a solid fucking drum sound with three mics”—depending on what you want, obviously, but—
Jesse: Fix it in post!
(laughter)
Dillon: Yeah, but I mean, that’s not an inaccurate thing to talk about. We figured out our process. Two songs from that first project made it onto frozenthere.
Jesse: We went to Indiana and we thought we would make a five song EP. So we finished five songs over the few weeks and thought, “This is sick, we did amazing, we’re soooo good,” and then I immediately went on tour for two months and afterwards we all listened to the songs and thought, “ohhhhhh, this is pretty bad!”
Dillon: So we went back to Indiana in December of 2016 and stayed for another three weeks and pretty much everything went out the fucking window; we pretty much wrote and recorded the entirety of frozenthere then.
Jesse: The writing and recording process are pretty indistinguishable.
Dillon: This is also when we started using Ableton which I think informed the way we wrote music.
Jesse: We would improvise a lot and we would build from those improvisations into these sound walls. Then we’d just chip away at the wall until we had something and get the vibe of the song. Honestly, the lyrics would usually come last. We were figuring out the process; in the past it had felt a lot more scrappy, but this felt like we were settling into a thing.
ThrdCoast: You were cultivating these environments.
Jesse: We realized that the only way we were going to make music was if we schedule this time. We’d get on the phone and see when everyone lined up and then schedule these retreats to Indiana. It’s usually never more than twice a year for around two weeks. The new record was made there.
Dillon: Everything since noneofuscared has been recorded there.
Jesse: I remember getting to Indiana and—noneofuscared had this really “band-y” sound, like we were saying, “Look at us play our instruments”—it was really indulgent, we had a lot to prove. I was really interested in making a record that felt more compositionally minded and a little less like we had a bass player, and a guitar player, and a keyboardist, and a drummer, and some of them sing sometimes. Instead of that, we wanted to just make music completely separate from the thing that we were trained to do, which is just to play our instruments. I was also really into this phase—which I don’t think I’ve really left—which is to try and play as little bass as possible.
Dillon: There are so many songs on this record that have like, no solid bass performance (laughs).
Jesse: There was a point where I was literally being begged to just play bass on some stuff.
Dillon: It’s like pulling teeth! I’d be like, “Yo, Jesse, why don’t you play some bass on this stuff,” and he’d be like, “yeah, no” (laughs).
Jesse: I have like a little percussion setup and all of my Casios out and I’m like, “Now this is music!” I don’t know, a bass line can very often be the whole song, and I’m just very interested in exploring other ways of making a song and supporting it in all of the other necessary musical ways and not just the one that people have told me to do a lot of the time.
Dillon: It’s funny; not that I’m the complete opposite mindset of Jesse, but there are different sides to it. When I started touring with a lot of pop-leaning acts, I was getting really frustrated with the drum parts I was playing and certain arrangements of certain songs. There were things that, if I were in a certain situation, I would change to make it sound more like something I would want to listen to. So that approach just morphed into how I approach altopalo. You listen to something like Blonde by Frank Ocean, or any record that you think, “This is fucking brilliant. Why is it so brilliant? What are the drums doing there? What are the vocals doing there? Why did you not do a verse/chorus/verse/chorus? What makes it work this way?” That’s so inspiring to know that music doesn’t have to follow a formula and you can still like it, and a bunch of other fucking people can like it too. Similar to the whole “chicken or the egg” conversation, like, do you play music for yourself or for others, and I think it’s equal parts both. To experience a form of creativity that transcends what the norms have been is an amazing privilege and talent we have that can only be nurtured. I think that’s probably one of the main reasons why we work together; we all have that mindset that what’s happening outside in the music industry isn’t working, so why don’t we all just do it ourselves?
ThrdCoast: That’s the punk rock in altopalo.
Jesse: In a lot of ways, yeah.
Dillon: All of the music we had growing up all had that vibe too. Mike’s super into prog rock, that’s his bread and butter. I grew up listening to Parliament Funkadelic.
Jesse: Rahm and I both loved… The Beatles (laughs).
Dillon: They broke the rules back in the day! We listen to boundary pushing musicians and I want to be a part of that conversation too.