TOBY DRIVER INTERVIEW
TARTAR LAMB is an avant-electroacoustic band hailing from New York City, led by composer Toby Driver, who has performed and recorded with contemporary geniuses such as Trey Spruance (Secret Chiefs 3, Mr. Bungle), G. Stuart Dahlquist (Burning Witch, ASVA), and Randall Dunn (Sunn0)), Master Musicians of Bukkake). Their hallucinatory music has its roots in doom-goth, progressive rock, and new age, and has combined these influences with their experiences in the modern classical and avant-jazz worlds of downtown New York to create a completely unique, complex, heartbreaking, and meticulously composed genreless sound all their own. On October 20th at Roulette, TARTAR LAMB will be performing their 2010 four-movement suite, “Polyimage of Known Exits,” a terrifying take on euthanasia and regret. “Polyimage…” features heavy electric bass, piles of delay pedals, brutal noise, processed woodwinds, demented melodies, and haunted vocals in glacial freefall around the galactic moebius of Kronos. Following this, Driver and the members of Tartar Lamb will premiere new material in a similar vein.
ROULETTE: Tell us as about the work you’ll be doing at Roulette.
TOBY DRIVER: Tartar Lamb was originally created in 2006 as a duet between myself and violinist Mia Matsumiya as a small-ensemble, more easily tourable substitute for our then-main band, Kayo Dot. With an absence of percussion, I came up with a system that would, in short, have a lot of content and information, and a strong, linear melodic sense, but would be able to be performed trancelike, with malleable time being the main improvisatory element. Tartar Lamb self-released an album, Sixty Metonymies, in 2007 (The metonymy in question being each of the composition’s phrases’ relation to one another, and the associated imagery being one of an infernal Tarot set of low animals). This time around, for Tartar Lamb II and II.5, the music uses the same process in terms of time and relationship between the repetition and the linear melodies, but has been expanded to a larger ensemble, so these events’ relationships have increased exponentially – four main voices each affecting one another, as opposed to two (with a little bit of a mechanical element keeping everything grounded). To put it more simply, it’s strict four-part harmony with an indeterminate pace, so each player in the ensemble basically has to know everyone else’s part in order to know how and when their own part is supposed to fit in. The setting of this composition, “Polyimage of Known Exits”, is a single bedroom heavy with the smell of an overdose of medicine and the naïve whooshing of an oxygen machine continuing to breathe although its counterpart has stopped.
R: What are some defining characteristics of the musical scene you would fit yourself into? What elements of your scene differentiate it from what has come before, or what is happening now?
TD: I would fit myself into a sort of neo-goth scene made up of musicians who have been influenced by intense dark experiences and personalities and for whom music has been an intensive pursuit, resulting in a unique modern combination of academic sophistication and non-image-oriented heavy goth. Music that doesn’t exist for the sake of fun. Different from what has come before, because now may be the first moment where the people who grew up on certain bands (of say 1988-1992) are now at a point where they’re old enough to command some kind of respect in regards to that music; our generation of educated and experienced musicians can help lend “serious” validity to music that would have been thought of as not respectable or “serious” by previous generations. Hopefully we can use the brilliance those artists have offered us, musically, and be understood as “serious” where they were unfairly overlooked.
R: What was the last music you listened to?
TD: One band I play in did a show recently, and the majority of the night was DJed by the guy who runs this blog. I was super into nearly all the music he played: http://systemsofromance.blogspot.com/
R: Do you consider yourself more a composer or a performer?
TD: I’m both, but as a performer, I feel most comfortable as a performer of my own music, ha ha!
R: Is there an event or experience that led you to start in experimental media?
TD: No, I think that I’ve just been making music in a way that suits my personality, and it’s other people who have characterized it as experimental. As far as using creative techniques, I think that exploratory aspect is what attracts me to music in the first place. The times when I’ve created music by following rules have felt like.. something different than how actually creating music feels.
R: Do you do other things aside from music?
TD: Yes, I attempt to draw and paint sometimes! I’m not educated in that, but have been doing it my whole life, whenever I get the opportunity (I do just a few projects a year, as opposed to doing music almost every day). Usually any time I do it, it’s related to some record I’m releasing as opposed to just non-connected drawing projects. (Stuff can be found at kayodot.net/toby)
