Features
Unknown Mortal Orchestra: ‘I Was Going To Give Up Music’
By Doug Wallen
In an online age of full disclosure, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson tells DOUG WALLEN he’s happy keeping people in the dark.
After his Kiwi “troublegum” trio The Mint Chicks split up, Ruban Neilson stuck around in the band’s adopted base of Portland, Oregon. Though he initially decided to give up music, Neilson soon came around to pursuing it by himself as a hobby. And so – naturally – he made a psych record using hip-hop breakbeats. Casual uploads of this new work led to blog buzz and a deal with US label Fat Possum, and from there he assembled Unknown Mortal Orchestra with former Mint Chicks producer Jake Portrait on bass and teenager Julian Erhlich on drums. A self-titled first album followed, with prolific touring ever since.
The album has rightly been acclaimed for its odd sound, bent pop hooks, and deeply psychedelic aura. In a world of readymade music, it’s fresh and alive. Neilson’s genre-melding band is coming to Australia for two festivals late this year, but he made time for an interview from a tour stop in San Francisco.
Why did you decide to stay in Portland after The Mint Chicks ended?
Well, I thought I was going to give up music, and I thought it’d be much nicer to not do music in Portland. I just wanted to do something else. Then I started interning at a film production company. I started doing a bunch of projects for people and making some money doing it. After doing that for a while, I started wanting to do some music, because I realised I could just do music for a hobby. That was kind of exciting. I decided I was gonna make a psych record in my spare time, while I was trying to do all this other stuff. The odd weekend that I would get off, I would borrow a friend’s basement and record a song. After I’d done that for a while, I put it online. That’s how the band started really, putting it online and getting a lot of attention from the recordings.
Did you sing at all in Mint Chicks?
I sang back-up and the odd song, but not really. My brother [Kody] was the singer.
So was it a learning curve for you?
Yes, it was. But when I was doing the recordings, I didn’t really think it was that big a deal to make it playable live. So I’d do a different [vocal] sound on every song. I just listened to the song and thought about what kind of character needed to be singing. It was quite hard to do live, because I change my voice quite a lot from song to song and do a bunch of things that are quite hard on my voice. But it’s fine now. We’ve been on tour so much that I’ve worked through that issue.
When you put the songs online, there was no biographical info about the band. And even the album doesn’t have that. Do you not want to give too much away?
When people ask me questions, I just tell them whatever they want to know. But in general, I prefer to be a little bit oblique. I’m more comfortable that way. Like at the moment, the live band has been playing in pitch darkness. Some people get kind of angry about it. We’re just trying it out. It feels good for us to do it that way, but I think people want to see the band. So we’re trying to figure out how to split the difference between being able to get lost on stage and not have to deal with the idea of everybody looking at you the whole time, and also giving people something to look at. I’d always rather be secretive and make money off of doing music and not have to put any other part of myself on the line. But you have to find the balance.
The music lends itself to being played in the dark. It’s this weird, self-contained thing where you feel like you should put on headphones and close your eyes.
That’s the way I see it, but that’s not the way everybody sees it. I think maybe eventually our fan base will be people that will just shut their eyes or something. I’m not sure how it will work out. I think [now] people just think: “What is this gimmick?” It’s what feels better for us. I feel like it should be easy to understand. Most people don’t enjoy public speaking or putting themselves out to be judged.
Is there a story behind the typos in ‘Ffunny FFrends’ and ‘Thought Ballune’?
I don’t know. Sometimes things need to be spelled wrong so they have their own identity once they get onto the Internet. If you know how to misspell the song title correctly, you know how to find it correctly. It’s like so a song really has its own name … a combination of words with their own spelling. My parents spelt me and my brother’s names wrong for some reason, so we had our own names.
There’s a big hip-hop influence on the drum breaks. How did that come about?
I was making the record at home in my living room, before I had the opportunity to stay at people’s places and borrow their basements. I couldn’t make any noise, so I couldn’t really record drums. So I started messing around with breakbeats. I realised that the drum sound of the kind of hip-hop I like goes pretty well with psych guitars and all the stuff that I was wanting to do. It seemed like an easy thing to meld together, like Captain Beefheart and RZA. Putting those two sounds together was much easier than I would have thought. I started recording drums later on, [like] for ‘Bicycle’. But all the early stuff was made in a situation where I couldn’t make that much noise.
How exactly were you doing the breaks?
Just samples from a hip-hop compilation. A break compilation. I’m not sure, but some of them are probably in hip-hop songs already.
Did Julian play on the record at all?
No. He played on a Little Dragon remix I did. That’s all I’ve done with Julian so far, recording-wise. But my plan for the next record is for him to be playing on the whole record.
[Historical embedded media is withheld pending rights review.] Little Dragon - Nightlight (Unknown Mortal Orchestra Remix) by WeGetPress
Is he able to pull off those drum breaks live?
That’s pretty much how he got the gig. I asked Jake to play bass and help me look for a drummer, and we tried out quite a few drummers. It was hard finding somebody good enough. The beats have a real swing to them, and a lot of drummers – even really good drummers who have good time – don’t understand how to make their drums sound like that. But he does. He can do it. But it did take us a long time. We put a lot of stuff off until we could find the right drummer, ‘cause it was gonna save us a lot of hassle further down the line.
Jake produced the last Mint Chicks album [Screens]. Was it good having someone you’d worked with before to help kick off this new thing?
Yeah, we got along really well and I really enjoyed talking about music with Jake when we did Screens. So when it came to putting the band together, I was really excited to get Jake involved. He’s a producer, so he thinks like a producer. I thought it’d be really good to have someone who plays bass like a producer rather than like a bass player, if that makes sense. Sort of be appropriate and understand the idea of making the bass sound like it was from a different time. Jake had never actually played bass, but he was able to pick it up and play it well.
The album feels really crackly and homemade, sort of like J Dilla or Dungen.
Cool. I have these memories of discovering my dad’s record collection. I set up his turntable and I think it was basically through hip-hop that I tried to scratch records. I was just being stupid. Then I realised that the records were really good and started listening to them. He had a bunch of Frank Zappa stuff, and The Who and The Beatles. I have this weird, warm memory of that period. When I was making this record, I wanted it to feel a little bit like that, like discovering this weird music from the past and then realising that it feels relevant. A lot of those records blew away the stuff I was listening to at the time. So it was a pretty big thing in my life, I guess.
As a whole, does the band sound pretty similar to the record live?
I think so. We never get to see our own band, but we definitely put a lot of effort into getting the sounds right. That’s one of the things about Jake: he’s so much about getting sounds, because of engineering and producing. It’s not like we really want to reproduce the record. What we want to do is be the band that we think would have made the record. The record feels like it comes from the past, and when we play live we try to allow ourselves to do things that bands used to do, like jam. I guess we try to model ourselves more on the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Led Zeppelin live.
You can do it a number of ways. You can having somebody playing an MPC [Music Production Center] and make it really modern. I even thought about playing off a laptop. But it’s just not as interesting as actually having a bunch of musicians that are good at playing their instruments. A lot of things are the same as the record, but there’s a lot of stuff that people are really surprised about. We rock out more.
“It seemed like an easy thing to meld together, like Captain Beefheart and RZA.”
Have you started working on the next record yet?
Just songs. I haven’t had time to even demo anything. I’ve just been on the road the whole time. But I’ve been putting out a record a year [in some form] since 2003 or something, so I think there’ll be one ready for the middle of next year. I have a bunch of dream scenarios that I would like to make the record under, but I could always make the record at home as well.
Well, this album has gotten lots of attention around the world, so you might be able to do some of those dream scenarios.
Yeah, maybe. Just the idea of getting into certain studios sounds exciting. I think I still want to have parts of the record come together in isolation, so I have that clear space in my head to make the record sound the way I want it to sound. I don’t want to be one of those bands that makes a really charming record at home and then totally cleans up, gets a producer, and becomes a different band.
Are The Mint Chicks definitely done forever?
No, I don’t think so. I always have some vague idea of what might happen with that. In my head I imagine us getting back together for some project and distilling all the best things about the band, which would be exciting. But I think it’d be a little way away yet. I want to be a little bit older when we do that. But we’re all really good friends still. I think part of the reason to break up the band was so we’d still be friends. There were actually no creative differences. It was just burnout, I think. It’s not like anybody betrayed anybody else, or we have totally different ideas about music. We still really agree on music a lot. So I definitely don’t think it’s over for good. But now I’m really busy. [Laughs]
+