achieve the heavy sound without drums; if Andrew started laying down big Black Sabbath beats I think we’d get dragged off into a stoner-rock dungeon and never return… THE 22: Tell me a little about some of the instruments you guys use in Iron Dog? SP: Andrew’s probably the most inventive in this area. My bass is using a fairly straightforward set of effects: ringmodulation, distortion, filter, and echo. The Nord is of course completely open so I can wire in any number of effects; I feel like the most unique thing there is a lot of the sounds “play themselves” while I’m free to improvise more on the bass. Sarah gets some pretty wild sounds out of her rig! AD: I played my drum set and had some gongs, including Sarah and Stuart’s big (maybe 30” diameter) gong. I put things on the drum heads to change their sounds—mute their resonance, make them buzz, raise the pitch of the drum frequencies. I put clamps and strings of bells on cymbals. I drum with plastic chopsticks. I also used my extended techniques—things involving friction, air pressure, bowing, pressure points on the drum membranes. I scrape the drum head with slivers of bamboo while pressing bells on the head to make set of sounds. Bow a metal dustpan or a sheet of thin aluminum. A lot of these things let me do what I usually can’t do as a drummer—sustain tones and work with pitch. This lets me interact with the other instruments in profoundly different ways. Many reviewers are unaware these sounds come from the drums. If you’re not familiar with the sounds and you’re just listening and not seeing what I’m doing you wouldn’t know they were from drums.
SB: I process my violin with patches which I’ve programmed on the Boss GT8, and I process my voice with various settings on a delay/reverb pedal. My main focus vocally is spoken word, but I do add tone content and vocal improvisation at times. I’m looking into expanding my vocal effects, and also having Stuart process my voice through the synth. THE 22: Sarah, many of your words sort of almost tell the stories of folks and a lot of them see to be poems almost about the folly of human misunderstanding or communication, as well as questions about our ability to be prepared for what’s to come (is it for breaking?) What to you is the story behind this work? SB: I think the word-side serves as a way to express that which is psychologically complicated, or otherwise resides precariously between reality and its various opposites. Often life’s darker moments, but not exclusively. Though I might have written a poem for a certain reason or with a certain meaning, when it comes time to perform it, just as with a musical piece, I bring to the text my present concerns and emotional state. The reader or audience I assume is doing the same. Plus the band influences which direction I go with the words. So the meanings are somewhat flexible and improvisational. For me, the process of writing words is similar to composing music, though the impetus might be different. In both cases, I play with the original inspired elements and find shapes, form, development. The 22: What do you guys see in the future for Iron Dog? Any current exciting projects? SP: We’re always wanting to do more with multimedia, specifically video, to create more of a “happening,” enhance the psychedelic elements that way. We’re at the Tank in Manhattan October 18 as part of a multimedia series, and our CD Release Concert is November 10 at JACK, a new venue for the arts in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Look out for that!
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