Samara Lubelski's Breezy Resonance: An Interview
Samara Lubelski at Rare Book Room, circa 2003.
[First published in Bagatellen, 2005] Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, and recording engineer Samara Lubelski is not what anyone could call ‘pigeonholed’ in the climate of contemporary music. She has split her time between Germany, where she works with the psychedelic group Metabolismus, and her Lower East Side home base, working with a wide array of independent rock and experimental musicians and outfits over the years including The Sonora Pine (with Tara Jane O’Neil of Rodan and Retsin), Pacer, Hall of Fame, The Tower Recordings, trumpeter Nate Wooley, and guitarists Thurston Moore, Marcia Bassett, Bill Nace, and Matt Valentine. Her latest solo violin recording, Partial Infinite Sequence, is forthcoming via Relative Pitch (CD) and Open Mouth (LP). This interview took place in early 2005, between two DeStijl releases of lush psychedelic folk: The Fleeting Skies and Spectacular of Passages (Lubelski has at this writing seven albums in that vein, a cycle of closely-hued songs that deserve study).
Original interview coordinated by Clint Simonson. Photos by Matt Valentine (this page) and Vera Marmelo (main page).
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I wanted to start with the basics. You came up in New York, and I read a story of how you first got into music was spilling an egg cream on John Cage.
That was bullshit [laughs]! Yeah, that was the label being clever. I grew up in Soho; my father was an artist. There were a lot of artists living down there then, a big community, very active. People were creating their homes out of raw, unused spaces. My parents got me on violin at age five and pretty much forced it for a long time, until I finally started to enjoy it on my own. In my teens I started playing with other people, getting out of orchestral stuff and playing in bands.
Were you improvising at all at this point?
No, not until Metabolismus; that was a good twelve or thirteen years ago.
What were some of the early bands that you were involved with?
Oh gosh, let’s not get into it – let’s just say my ‘teenage influence.’ The more interesting stuff starts with Metabolismus, and my playing with them dates to about ‘91. I’ve played on about four of their LPs and a handful of singles. They very much have their own world and their own production style. I’ve always felt lucky to be included in any aspect of their work.
How did you get involved with Metabolismus?
It was purely by accident; I wanted to leave New York and go to Spain, and I [first] went to Germany and my father suggested I pick up a car that he had left in Süßen. I did go pick up the car but I burned out the clutch within forty minutes of departing, so I ended up staying in the area and very quickly got sucked in and met every single boy who played music in the village. That’s how I met those guys. They now have a studio where I recorded half of The Fleeting Skies and some of the next one as well.
You’re splitting your time between New York and Germany, right?
I’ve been living about two or three months out of every year there, sometimes longer.
Is it mostly to work with them, or are you doing other things in Europe as well?
I did some touring this last year, but mostly recording. I did the basic tracks of both records [in Germany]; their studio is really incredible – 2″ 16 track, Mellotron, celeste, vibraphone, organs, lots of Yamaha CS-series synthesizers, a Synthi 100, on and on.
Right, we wouldn’t have had Krautrock without those studios.
[laughing] Exactly – they just have a huge variety and wealth of instruments in their studio. I haven’t seen anything else like it.
As far as your own musical concept, that must really be an inspiration to work there.
The studio is in the country – you are looking out from the windows of the main room onto a mountain. There is a garden too and an average of 15 cats at any given time. It’s in a town called Degenfeld, which is about forty minutes east of Stuttgart.
Was getting involved with Metabolismus your introduction to improvisation, then, or had you done much of it before?
I had done a little bit before. But this was very intense in terms of musicianship, the level that it was at (and very psychedelic, of course). They’re very knowledgeable and were able to bring that knowledge of [different kinds of] music into the work, introduced me to a lot of records, filled in some things.
Apart from what might be called psychedelic, you really haven’t done much idiomatic improvisation, right? I’m referring to jazz, free jazz, or any other style of contemporary improvisation.
It’s interesting; all the people that I’ve worked with have flirted with those in one form or another, whether it be The Tower Recordings or Hall of Fame, but my personal aesthetic has been to avoid that because they’re pretty strong idioms that stand on their own, and I think you have to be pretty careful to make a foray into that ground. Hall Of Fame worked mostly with experimental sound and a rock background. We involved homemade sounds (we were four-trackers) and allowed in environmental sounds/noise, keeping it very loose, recording everything and then editing.
As far as being a multi-instrumentalist, how did you start picking up guitar, bass, and drums?
Metabolismus needed a bass player, so I got corralled into that, and then I started fooling around with guitar shortly after. Playing cello like I did on The Fleeting Skies was more or less winging it and vibraphone was like that as well. You just kind of pick these things up and do your best.
Do you approach these other instruments differently, coming from the violin?
That’s an interesting question. Obviously the education and training applies to all instruments, the knowledge of keys and such, does inform in that way. I do feel like there is distinct sound on the violin; whether it informs the other instruments and the writing from them may be more elusive.
Going back and re-listening to that record, I feel a ’string-y’ sound cutting through everything, whether there are strings or not. It does feel like the notes blend together a lot more.
I’d like to think that it does, but I’m too in it!
With the solo violin record that you did [In the Valley, CoM, reissued on Eclipse] do you feel that you approached a de-learning of the instrument? I know you’re educated on the violin, but at any point did you start to approach it as a de-learning or de-structuring process?
Definitely. That’s the case with Hall of Fame, where I did a lot of violin work, and In the Valley. With Hall of Fame I never wanted to play the violin as a classical instrument. Traditional music for the violin is usually focused on melody, and I tried to work more on distorting the tone of the instrument and abstracting the melody. With The Fleeting Skies I’m using it as background in a very traditional approach and having some sort of approximation of a string section.
How much electronic or other amplification is used in such a setting? The interesting thing for me was trying to discern what was acoustic and natural and what was constructed.
Everything started with the violin except MV’s tracks. We used pitched tape to get lower tones. My favorite effects to work with are the Memory Man (vibrato/tremolo and delay) and the ring modulator. I use these live with The Tower Recordings. Also, there is a lot of multi-tracking, like on the cover of the Dylan song. I would guess offhand that about half of it was electronic and half acoustic.
Since getting involved with Metabolismus, has your violin playing always been augmented?
No, there are moments when you just want a beautiful violin tone; it depends on the music. With The Fleeting Skies, it was all clean violin sounds. I’m trying to go for a genre-specific thing with that record.
This ties in to songs and the dictation of sound, but when did you start writing them?
Sporadically off and on over the years, but it wasn’t a primary focus until The Fleeting Skies. There was a random single that came out on Magic Eye about eleven years ago, and that was a guitar-and-vocal four-track thing. With Hall of Fame songwriting started around the third record. I would take snippets of improvisation and add vocals on top, but by the third record Dan Brown and I were both writing more structured material.
What was the impetus to move in this direction rather than to go further into more open territory?
I think that with the ‘free’ thing, I noticed that a lot of the bands I was around and working with started to hit similar walls with free improvisation. You rely on chemistry for improvisation – how inspired you are both by your instrument and the people you’re collaborating with – and I noticed a free jazz element started informing a lot of projects I was working with, and it became rather didactic. It relied less on interplay and more on constructions as we know they’ve been done before.
It is quite hard to avoid some formalism in any open improvisation, which I find extremely ironic. Even listening to a supposedly non-idiomatic ensemble work through several albums or pieces, you can discern a form.
But the whole time you’re fighting it, and at some point you lose the battle. If it’s no longer a challenge, and you start to know the language of your own playing and the person you’re playing with, you can tell what’s going to happen and the whole concept of ‘freedom’ gets lost – you’re too well versed.
If you take it to the level of, rather than fighting structure, embracing it – that offers a new challenge.
Exactly, and then you start writing songs. Or, for example, working with Matt Valentine on In the Valley, he would come in and say ‘this is a scale, and I want you to play your choice of notes, of these ascending and these ones descending.’ You’re offered a certain amount of structure and a certain amount of freedom, and that modal scheme worked really well on some of the pieces on that record. If I understand correctly, that’s also the basis for much Indian music – there is a fair amount of construction and a fair amount of choice.
I was going to ask you how non-Western violin music informed your work.
Not a huge amount. I always try to keep my ears open. With Hall Of Fame we just did something specific to our experience, which was playing or hanging out in a small apartment in New York City. I think environment is pretty important for all music, and to choose otherwise is to deny a truth that exists. To cut off environment is to displace something inherent.
With that in mind, recording half of an album in Germany and half in New York, how would you say that the songs on The Fleeting Skies differ environmentally?
When I first started writing in Germany, the winter was beautiful. The snow was clean and white, birds were chirping, and the sun was shining – very nice. Things get tighter when you come back to New York; the focus is a bit more tense. With the second record, I wrote most of the songs in NYC with the intention of going to Germany and reworking them there. Germany gave a different color, opened things up. New York can get pretty uptight.
Right. If you look back even to the ’70s, Jazz groups from other areas like Chicago were flocking to New York, but environmentally it seems like the antithesis.
How long have you been working as an engineer at the Rare Book Room?
I’ve been there about two or three years.
Had you been recording and engineering before that?
Not really. I did four-track recordings (which at the time was just the easiest way to document everything we did) and then the Tascam eight-track. Degenfeld had a 2-inch 16-track there, and Metabolismus were very generous about showing me the basics and leaving me to it. Hall Of Fame had always worked with Nicolas Vernhes at the Rare Book Room in Brooklyn. After I had learned some of the basics in Degenfeld, he invited me to spend time at the studio assisting him (and asking a lot of questions).
I was going to ask how being involved with that process affected your music, both in more ‘free’ and more structured contexts, as well as how engineering might be affected by your deeper-listening experiences.
I hope it’s all intertwined and that everything informs everything. I still fail to read manuals, and that’s a product of being self-taught, though I’ve been yelled at a couple of times [laughs]. I always think that listening is the most important aspect of all of this, as it has to sound good from any perspective. I prefer engineering myself because I like working alone and I like high fidelity, so this is the best arrangement for now.
It’s rather curious that some of the ensembles you work in have been called ‘low-fi,’ when that has nothing to do with anything you do, especially in terms of how much one can hear on those records.
It’s interesting that a lot of people can’t get past what they hear as ‘low fidelity,’ which always surprises me. I remember that the mastering engineer of the first Hall of Fame record thought it was unreleaseable, which I thought was flattering [laughs].
As far as ideas of folk music and communication within that idiom, having a more ‘free’ or collective experience within the context of folk versus a more traditional approach to tunes and folk material, how do you view a lot of what you’ve done in light of the folk tradition? Do you try and separate yourself from anything like that?
I don’t know; I don’t think about my work literally as the result, but more as the feeling in all of these things. If we perceive folk as something more natural, in which people are just sitting around and making music, in the moment, without regard or intent for results, then I would say a good portion of the projects I’ve been a part of apply. I wouldn’t necessarily put myself in that category now, because I’m working in a studio and trying to refine things. The Tower Recordings did a gig in December over in Dundee, Scotland, and everyone was very keyed into one another and aware.
Is there much audience involvement or participation with something like that?
I always feel like that’s pretty essential with improvised music; I think that an audience can really affect what happens. The more responsive an audience, all your awareness is heightened. You’re not just aware of the people you’re working with, because very few of us can put our parameters up that clearly. You feel the entire room and the people in it, and it’s pretty amazing. In Dundee, people were actually dancing and it made for an incredible show.
That’s actually closer to my original thought, which was of the audience literally becoming part of the music.
One of the goals is that people will involve themselves, dancing and cheering, listening deeply, whatever. They might clap along or whatever brings them into the experience.
You’re working on this new record, but are there any other projects you’re working on?
I’m working on a track for the Amish Records ten year compilation. Nemo at Time-Lag also asked me to do a 78rpm record for his blue series, which will probably be very limited. It will be a challenge, making something that will translate to that medium.
Right, because 78’s have that inherent quality to them, and you almost want to increase the scratchiness and the odd density that the music has on those records.
Yeah, and how do you transcend the scratchiness to where the music is just music, as you would four-track or ‘low-fi.’ I’m pretty curious. But aside from that and the full length, I did some recent work with White Magic.
Is there anything else?
Collaboration is great, and working alone is great.
It’s all great.
Right, it is.
