Videosyncrasy is a new feature on Local Cut wherein a musician is asked to answer questions or comment on video clips that either feature his/her/their band's music or are connected to their work in some fashion.
Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang will always hold a place in the canon of American independent music thanks to their work as the rhythm section for the dream-pop trio Galaxie 500. But in the years since that band dissolved, the two have tarried on as a duo, releasing a series of gorgeous, bucolic albums that play like psychedelics-induced dreams. Damon & Naomi's latest, False Beats & True Hearts (released last month on their own label, 20/20/20), rings out with spacious atmospherics, lilting folk and some fantastic guitar work by Michio Kurihara of the band Ghost. As well, the two started Exact Change, a small publication house that has released an impressive roster of surrealist literature and poetry.
Damon Krukowski was kind enough to check out some video clips and answer some questions for Videosyncrasy via email. Be sure to check out Damon & Naomi when the play Bunk Bar tomorrow (Wednesday, June 1) with Amor de Dias.
WW: How did you get to know Chris Marker? Krukowski: We found his CD-Rom Immemory in French, and loved it—I don't remember the first contact, but I think we must have simply written to him, asking if we could publish it in English on our press, Exact Change. That did eventually happen, but it took a long while and during that time we became friends. He was very warm to us from the start, he always said it was because we were musicians and he likes musicians—he is one himself, in fact.
How did this video [or still image, rather] collaboration come about? Naomi sent Chris the song, because it's a lyric of hers that she felt was connected to his work. And he sent back the image! Sometimes things just fall in place, you can't plan them. Maybe that's what Chris liked about our being musicians—we've always been open to accident, collaboration, the things that happen between instruments that you can't predict. He seems to work that way in film and video.
You worked with Marker on a CD-Rom that came out on your Exact Change imprint. Was this his idea or did you work with him on it? Well as I mentioned we had found it in French and contacted him, but it turned out he had already prepared an English translation which the original publisher, the Pompidou in Paris, had decided not to use. So all the elements were there for us, but it required re-linking and re-scripting the entire CD-Rom in order to replace all the language for an English edition. It took months of work—Naomi did the bulk of it. She really lived with Chris's memories during that time.
What is the status of Exact Change? Someone had mentioned recently that it wasn't a going concern, but are you still going to be releasing books through it? The press exists, all our backlist is available through the wonderful distributor D.A.P. (www.artbook.com), but we haven't been producing new titles regularly. There are several projects in the works, but we're approaching them much more slowly and cautiously than before. We simply ran out of money, and time, for devoting to publishing the way we had been. Books, like records, don't sell like they used to!
Your new album is—like The Earth Is Blue—coming out on your own label. Is it better for you to be controlling everything to do with your music rather than working with outside folks? We work with a number of people on our label—our manager Ben Goldberg, from Ba Da Bing; his staff including Hunter Giles, from Infinite Best; our distributor Revolver, who have production, sales, and marketing staff; publicist Jessica Linker; booking agent Erik Selz; not to mention the people at labels we license to in Japan and the UK...it's a pretty social business, in fact! I don't feel like we're controlling it, so much as collaborating with everyone who works with us on it. The funny thing is that we've been finding ourselves more open to input now from the people we work with, than when we were on other labels. Maybe it's because we've assembled this group ourselves. Or maybe we're just becoming more reasonable over time!
You've released one solo album by Michio Kurihara and the International Sad Hits collection on the label. Do you foresee signing any artists to the label or releasing other work by other artists in the future? We're working on another volume of the International Sad Hits series, we've hit some rights snags with it but hope to see it through. But we started the label really just to house our own work.
You always choose such interesting covers to tackle. What is it that inspires you to take on a particular song? Covers are fun to work on, and to sing—we choose songs that we want to learn from, or that express something we haven't been able to through a song of our own. We've been adding new covers to our live show, but the last two albums are the only ones we've ever recorded without any covers on them. We wanted to lean on our own songwriting—to try and put everything that we were feeling at that time into our own songs.
What was it that attracted you to this song? Oh I think the same that has attracted many to it—Tim Buckley. But I think what caused us to cover it was finding an alternate version of his own, from demos that came out on Rhino Handmade. The album version with electric guitar, which is closer to This Mortal Coil's cover, came later in his career. But when he first wrote the song he taped it with an acoustic guitar, and a slightly different lyric. That's the version we worked with, as we developed our cover of it.
We've often covered songs that seemed to have some kind of slip or gap in the original, which allows for reinterpretation. In Galaxie 500, we chose to cover "Ceremony" in part because there were versions of it both by Joy Division, and New Order. It seemed like a kind of permission to try it yet another way.
This video features Michio Kurihara on guitar...how did you get to know him and start working with him? Ghost brought Kurihara with them on their second US tour—we had been on the road with them for their first tour, and become friends. We went to see them on their return, and were unprepared for this new lead guitarist of theirs who tore the roof off the venue in some songs, but also played so delicately. By the time we collaborated with Ghost for our album with them on Sub Pop in 2000, Kurihara had become a central part of their sound, and consequently of our album. We ended up touring behind that release as a trio with Kurihara, which turned into the core group on all our records since.
This is another video where it was visually represented by an artist - in this case Cedrick Eymenier. Do you prefer to have music videos like this that don't feature the band at all? We have always collaborated with other artists by inviting them do what they do, never by telling them what to do. All the Galaxie 500 videos were by Naomi's friend Sergio Huidor—we gave him carte blanche. For the second one, he came back with footage stolen from PETA propaganda videos. Rough Trade were not happy, but we defended it—not because we were so set on having our music illustrated with tortured animals, God knows, but because we had asked an artist to contribute work and that's what he had done. What went in it was up to him.
How did you end up working with Cedrick on this video? Again, Naomi and Cedrick became artistic friends—Cedrick had taken photos of us one time when we were on tour in Paris, and Naomi became interested in his work. He makes films as well as photos, and later he set one to our music. I think he did that first one of his own accord, but we liked it a lot and invited him to continue. There are three now, they were all released on the DVD we put together last year for Factory 25, 1001 Nights.
Do you have any particular artist(s) or filmmaker that would love to collaborate with on a video project like this? Yes, but even more we have a friend who we think is a great film curator, Haden Guest, and so we have actually invited him to invite filmmakers to work on future projects. Double hands off!
Do you remember this gig at all? Are you kidding? You don't forget being that nervous.
How do you feel about having videos like this floating around capturing shows from over 20 years ago? We chose to make that public, it's from a VHS tape Naomi and I found in our closet when we were assembling the Galaxie 500 DVD for Plexifilm, Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste. It's just too funny that a document of that show exists. And in some ways it's probably the most accurate representation of what that band sounded like, to ourselves—there's no sound system, no engineer—just the way we sounded in our practice space, when we wrote all those songs.
Yeti Books is gearing up to release an oral history of the band. Are you happy that there is still interest in the band after all this time or would you rather people put their focus on your current work? I'd like to think it's not a zero-sum game. I'm happy there's interest in our music, past and present.
Dean Wareham has been doing a lot of touring lately playing nothing but Galaxie 500 material, but you've tended to shy away from performing Naomi's songs in the years since the band broke up. Is that a conscious choice on your part? Actually we think of all those songs as ours, collectively—we wrote them together, regardless of who sang them. As for Dean touring them with a different band? I think it's lame. Anyway you know how these reunions go—eventually he'll probably have a fresh falling out with himself, and go back to his solo career. And I suppose if that doesn't pan out, he could always do the "Dean Wareham plays Dean Wareham playing the songs of Galaxie 500" tour...
You released a CD featuring Kim's work on your label, alongside three other Asian folk singers. Was the idea just to bring their work to a larger audience? Not a larger audience necessarily—these are artists who have a strong following in their own countries—but to an audience outside their native language. Everyone everywhere sings in English these days, and we wanted to highlight singers who are working in their own idiom. It seems like something very important is lost in musical communication, when lyrics all have to be in English.
What draws you to the music of Kim Soo-Doo or any of the other artists you featured on that collection? Those are all singers whose emotional power we felt transcended any possible language barrier. That's how we discovered their music for ourselves, while we were traveling. And that's what we wanted to share.
Are there plans to do another CD collection from other parts of the world? Yes, as I mentioned we've hit a rights snag on the next one, but we're still hoping to continue the series. We buy records wherever we go, especially of singers.
You tend to tour more overseas then here in the States - at least that's how it looks from my narrow frame of reference. Do you feel like your audiences are bigger or more interested in your sound in Japan or Europe? If so, why do you think that is? Maybe we should be singing in a language other than English! Actually the UK has been very kind to us over the years, London is one of our favorite places to play. I think if anything, it's been harder for us to tour the US because we're not big enough to play theaters, but we really need a "listening room" because we're so quiet. We've never had drums in the band, and we've never been a good match for many of the rooms on the indie rock circuit. That's changed a bit in recent years, thanks to more popular bands playing acoustic instruments, but it's still always a bit of a struggle for us to sing in a bar. In Europe we get to play a lot of art spaces or small theaters, where people are generally ready to listen to music without drums. And in Japan—well in Japan they are just ready to listen!
